Inventor and manufacturer, Thomas Beecham, (born in St Helens, 1820)
If the locals are curious, his first product was a laxative using soap, ginger and aloe

Also on this day in history

Dedicated crime readers might recognise this particular date for a story that didn’t get solved by Poirot. It was the day Agatha Cristie disappeared from her Surrey home back in 1926, turning up 11 days later, on the 14th, in Yorkshire, where she was staying under an assumed name at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate. She claimed at the time she had no recollection of the past fortnight and it remains a mystery to this day.

In 1984 British Telecom was privatised. The shares immediately made massive gains. Au revoir GPO.

1621 : Galileo invented the telescope.

The next is more tongue-in-cheek, but apparently true for all that. In 1976 a 40ft inflatable pig was set up as part of the promotions for Pink Floyd’s soon to be released ‘Animals’ record. Algie, as it was nicknanamed, was due to be photographed for the album cover, but it had other ideas and broke free from its moorings, ramaging (ok, drifting) across London. The Civil Aviation Authority issued a warning to all pilots that a flying pig was on the run!. The pig eventually crash-landed on a barn in a dairy farm in Kent. If would have been more ironic though if it landed on a piggery, eh.

2013 : Having previously filed for the largest municipal banruptcy in American history on July 18th 2013, a few months later, on December 3rd, 2013 the city of Detroit, Michigan was declared bankrupt by judge Stephen Rhodes, owing $18.5 billion to creditors. There are a lot of site and articles about now, like this one : 42 Staggering Photos Of Abandoned Detroit

Trending at this moment:

The most notable is RBS and Natwest bank’s outage for several hours on #cybermonday. Presumably all the people desperate for on-line bargains overloaded their servers. Net effect was a lot of people missing out, several more stranded as they couldn’t pay for petrol, train tickets, or the shopping, nor could they simply go to the ‘hole in the wall’ and draw some cash out they were off-line as well. Here’s The Independent’s story on it. A quick Google will list many, many more!

The other big trend, really going viral, is Amazon’s ‘Prime Air’. Lot’s of stories, but my take is it will crash and burn! I took one look at the story and thought, Nah! Jaded? Or Realistic? Think about it for a minute. You have a drone that will leave a depot and fly to its target with the payload! If that thought doesn’t get you running in the opposite direction nothing will, I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

It could malfunction and drop on someone’s head. Ambulance chasers are already wetting themselves over this cherry for picking

It could be hi-jacked and used as a weapon. Could, then will, if people with things to gain can abuse a system, they will. Basic politics too, is that!

It could be cyber-jacked and have it’s package re-routed to waiting thieves. (See above)

For fun or profit it could – and in America would – get shot out of the sky. See all of above for that point!

Makes you think, eh.

Interestingly enough, it was recently reported that people were using similar drone and remote control devices to smuggle weapons and contraband into US prisons.